More and more website owners realize the benefits of top search engine ranking. Therefore, they are willing to invest their time and money in search engine optimization. At the same time, many search engine optimization problems arise. I am trying to address some of them in this article.

Question 1. For the sake of time saving, I just scan our pamphlet as an image file and put it on our main site. Can you help me optimize the website for high ranking?

Your pamphlet may contain lots of text for visitors to read. Since you only scan it as an image file, search engines only recognize that you have a single image file in your webpage. Simply put, they just treat it like a photo or a graphic, and do not convert your image text for analysis and indexing. A solution is to add an alt attribute for the image. It is a bit better because a few HTML text are available for search engines to "understand" your webpage content. However, comparing with rich HTML text in a webpage, text in alt attribute is too few for search engines to analyze significance of your webpage.

Therefore, I do not recommend this approach although it may save you time in building a webpage.

Question 2. If I implement a SEO campaign, does it mean that I can give up my pay per click search engines marketing (PPC marketing)?

SEO campaign and PPC marketing are not mutually exclusive. On the contradiction, they are complementary with each other. First, I suggest you implement both natural SEO and PPC marketing for high conversion keywords. You can get more exposure in the search result pages. Second, because of copywriting or marketing communications consideration, you may not be able to implement SEO for all useful keywords. Under this circumstance, why not use PPC marketing as an alternative? For example, the word "pay-per-click search marketing", "PPC marketing", "search engine marketing", "paid search" are more or less with the same meaning. However, it may be confusing to use all the terms interchangeably through your website.

Question 3. My boss wants to have a full flash website so that our company site is more visually appealing. Can you help me to optimize the website after we make a full flash website?

From experience, many search engines can not "read" content from flash files. In many cases, search engines only treat flash file as if it is a single image file. They do not index the text or follow the navigation links to index content.

Matt Cutts, a Google representative, stated that Google has some improvements in reading textual content of a flash file by utilizing the search engine SDK tool offered by Adobe / Macromedia. However, the tool has not been updated frequently and extract text out of a flash file correctly is difficult. To conclude, reading textual content from flash file is still at a preliminary stage.

It implies that a full flash website is unlicensed to be well indexed by search engines. If natural top search engine ranking is very important to your success, it is not recommended to make a full flash website unless you have a large PPC marketing budget or very confident to create high link popularity over short period of time.

Dedicated IP address is not an imperative to get top search engine ranking. Many websites with top search engine ranking are using shared web hosting plans. It means that they are sharing the same IP address with other webmasters with low search engine ranking.

However, if your IP address is shared with many search engine spammers, your site's ranking can be adversely affected. Therefore, some search engine marketers prefer to get a dedicated IP address from their web hosts.

Question 5. If I have lots of content in a webpage, is it better to separate the content into 2 webpages?

I think it depends on search engines. For example, Google crawls only about the first 101 kilobytes of a webpage. If your content is more than 101Kb, you're better separating the content into 2 webpages.

Question 6. Why does my site suddenly disappear in Google?

There are several reasons for Google to exclude your site. First, you must make sure that your site meets Google's quality guideline, ie no spamming. For example, you do not put hidden text and links in your website. Second, your site is not hacked. Third, you should check whether your site has some malware. Last but not least, your site may be too new and Google is in the process of refreshing their index. During the process, Google may fall back to the old index version and hence your site suddenly disappears.

Question 7. How can I increase ranking of internal sub-pages?

Many webmasters found that sub-pages of their sites have poor search engine ranking and want to improve rankings of sub-pages. To solve the problem, you should ensure the sub-pages are not buried too deep within a site. Important sub-pages should get more internal links via cross linking related pages. In addition, you should try to get some external site links to your specific sub-pages.